Episode 152: Transcript
How Surveillance Dystopias Came True (with Wole Talabi)
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, do you miss the paranoid pop music of the 1970s and 1980s?
Annalee: [00:00:06] I kind of do, now that you mention it. I was a huge fan of Judas Priest. I love their song, “Electric Eye”, which is all about the evil eye in the sky that's spying on everyone, probably for the British government. And then also, little known fact, the Eurythmics, one of the greatest bands in the 1980s, the entire album that was devoted to 1984, that was about the book and, you know, spying on people. It was great.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] It was supposed to be like a movie soundtrack and then it wasn't a movie soundtrack, but they did it anyway. [crosstalk] I mean, you know, in the 80s, there were so many classic paranoid songs in the 80s. And there was that vibe where everything was kind of synthy and dark and kind of like neon. You had songs like “Who Can It Be” by Men at Work from the 70s, you had like “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath. You know, there were just all these songs about like being watched and people are looking at you and people are spying on you. And then, of course, the all time classic, “Somebody's Watching Me” by Rockwell.
Annalee: [00:01:23] Yes, funny because all of these are about just sort of keeping one eye open or like looking over your shoulder for actual people, right? Because this was really a time it was sort of a cuspy moment as CCTV's were slowly coming into places like Britain, but ubiquitous cameras just weren't around in the United States. And so the idea of being constantly watched was totally science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:49] Yeah, I feel like that's really the shift we've had in the last, like, I don't know, 30-40 years is that the idea that people are just constantly watching you, the idea that there's like a camera always recording you and that everything nothing you do in a public space or maybe even in a private space is really private. That's a new idea that has gone from being science fiction to just being reality. And we're still kind of catching up to that.
Annalee: [00:02:13] It's true. Yeah. And I think especially in workplaces, that's where it's really, you know, no one expects the workplace to have any private places at all.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:22] True.
Annalee: [00:02:23] And now there's new products you can buy that have been inspired by surveillance of people who are doing home-work, you know, they're working from home, but their companies have systems to track whether your mouse is moving to make sure you're being productive. So you can buy little devices that will jiggle your mouse once in a while if you decide to go to lunch for an hour.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:44] Oh, my God. I love it. I just want one of those like drinking birds that just goes up and down all the time forever. But just attach that to your computer. And it's like, look, I'm being so productive. It's going up and it's going down.
Annalee: [00:02:56] It's pecking the keys. So today, we are going to be talking about surveillance in science fiction and real life. What does it mean to be constantly watched? How does pop culture reflect the anxieties created by technologies that record everything from our daily walks to our daily poops? Plus, we're going to talk about what it means to subvert surveillance and make those electric eyes work for justice. And later in the episode, we are psyched to be talking to the science fiction author and editor Wole Talabi, whose new short story collection Convergence Problems just came out and it just blew us away.
[00:03:34] By the way, you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that can hear everything you say in your sleep. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. And my forthcoming book is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. I'm also the author of a science fiction book called The Terraformers, which was recently nominated for a Nebula Award.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:59] I’m Charlie Jane Anders. My young adult trilogy, The Unstoppable Trilogy, all three of them has been nominated for the Lodestar Award. And the third book, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, just came out in paperback. And also recently out is New Mutants Lethal Legion, a comic book I wrote for Marvel. And I have a novel coming out in 2025 called The Prodigal Mother.
Annalee: [00:04:23] ...Which is so good. And I can't wait for us to talk about it on the show. It'll be so awesome. Also on our mini episode next week, we will be talking about the trope of people turning invisible and why it is so often creepy as hell.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:41] Yeah, and did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and it’s funded by you: our listeners. You basically are the key ingredient that keeps this podcast chugging along and gives us the fuel for all of our incredibly well-thought-out and brilliantly researched takes.
[00:05:00] And you know, you can become part of Our Opinions Are Correct community. If you support us on Patreon, whatever you give us goes right back into making this podcast happen. And you can join us in our Discord where we hang out and explain everything in the universe and discuss what's going on in the world and just geek out about everything. Plus we post mini episodes every other week in between our regular episodes. And all of that can be yours for just a few bucks a month. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:05:31] All right, let's get surveilled.
[00:05:32] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:06:07] So Annalee, I know you've written in the past about the concept of the panopticon, which actually feels like a form of 250 year old science fiction. Can you explain about what is the panopticon and how did Michel Foucault perfect it?
Annalee: [00:06:23] So it is kind of science fiction from the 18th century. It was actually a prison, a kind of ideal prison, which is a bit of a contradiction in terms, conceived of by the social reformer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham. And back in 1791, he had this idea for a prison that would basically use what he thought of as soft punishment. And the idea was that everybody would be put into this donut shaped building completely circular with all of the cells facing inward. And there would be a guard tower or guard corridor, depending on which version you care to look at, where guards could stand and see all of the prisoners.
[00:07:08] But because of the way the guard tower was designed, the prisoners couldn't see the guards. And so it was considered kind of a soft punishment because this wasn't like somebody staring you in the face and smacking you. It was just that you always knew that someone could be watching you. So it was kind of a form of psychological discipline. You would never want to engage in some kind of infraction because maybe the guard was watching you at that moment. You'd never know.
[00:07:35] So this became key to the ideas hundreds of years later of the social critic and theorist Michel Foucault. So he published this book in the mid 70s, which in French it was called Survey et Punir, which is ‘Surveil and Punish’, which doesn't sound great in English. So it's translated as ‘Discipline and Punish’. But he was thinking of Bentham's ideal prison idea as being kind of a philosophical notion that fueled the carceral state.
[00:08:10] And Foucault popularized this idea of a carceral state and kind of carceral discourse and said, look, you know, the panopticon was an idea for a physical real prison. There were a couple of prisons designed around the world to imitate it. But he said, you know, it's also an idea about how we should run society and that we should punish people by putting them into these situations where they're constantly under surveillance.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:35] Wow.
Annalee: [00:08:37] And so he saw that as like underlying a lot of our ideas about social control and punishment. And that's how I think the idea became much more widely understood.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:50] Yeah. You know, I mean, obviously Foucault was totally wrong and we now don't live in a world where people are constantly watched and that constrains our behavior at all times. I mean, I just I'm glad we dodged that bullet.
Annalee: [00:09:01] We don't have a prison industrial complex. In fact, he was writing about it. I mean, people think of Foucault as like that wacky sex philosopher, but he was a historian of science and he was really interested in how people used science to justify this really horrific form of social control through punishment and locking people and subjecting them to authoritarian gazes, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:26] Yeah, and that thing of, you don’t know you’re being watched at all times and so you have to behave as if you’re being watched, like 24/7. That’s very real. That is pretty much the human condition in the 21st century is like, when I was younger, we had that thing that was like: dance as if no one’s watching. And now it’s like: dance as if someone’s always watching.
Annalee: [00:09:50] And recording it and putting it on TikTok.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:57] And you know, here in San Francisco, our mayor here - London Breed - has been really pushing hard for more surveillance. She wants the cops to have access to drones. I think we are actually now getting - this is now becoming a thing. Like it’s now becoming law. She’s been pushing for the cops to have access to drones, to be able to tap into surveillance cameras’ feeds in real time, to have license plate cameras that they can track people...
Charlie Jane: [00:10:16] And she’s basically described this as like - look, we’re just giving the cops access to the technology of the 21st century. And more tellingly, she came out and argued in a news interview that: What’s the matter? We’re already being watched all the time anyway.
London Breed Clip: [00:10:30] Everyone nowadays is carrying around all of these gadgets and phones and in someone's face out in the public and anyone who's not law enforcement can see everything that's going on.
Annalee: [00:10:43] Yeah, this is an argument that you hear a lot, which is, essentially, the cat's out of the bag. We have surveillance everywhere. Privacy is over. Like, just give it up. There's really no such thing as privacy.
[00:10:55] And I don't really think that's true. It's often asserted that people don't care about privacy, but the people making that claim almost always are either in a position of power politically, they work for the police, they work in banking or the tech industry, and they have a vested interest in this idea that privacy is over and that we shouldn't have privacy.
[00:11:23] And it's very rare that you hear ordinary citizens saying things like, yeah, I'm totally fine with the police using drones to track my car and like, you know, track my license plate all over town, because that is actually something that when you think about it is quite creepy and it feels like super easy to abuse it.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:43] Yeah, I feel like the existence of a system like that is kind of in essence abusive. In my day job back in the day, I actually wrote about the internet banking industry from like a law and policy perspective. So I interviewed a lot of people in internet banking about this and they would always be like, look, people say they care about privacy, but they really don't care about privacy.
[00:12:03] The example one guy gave me was like, well, you know, you sign up for like a supermarket, like rewards card. And so you get a discount on some of your supermarket purchases. But in return, the supermarket knows exactly what you bought. And they know that you bought butter and not margarine or that you bought like this brand of cereal, not this brand of cereal. And so you're giving up your privacy in exchange for like a discount and people are okay with that. And it's like, at the time I sort of nodded along, but now I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't care as much about somebody knowing what brand of cereal I buy, especially if it's not tied quite directly to my other aspects of my identity. But knowing where I go and who I talk to more basic stuff about like, I'm living my life that feels more fundamental than my brand of cereal.
[00:12:49] I think that there's, you know, there's a line there. And I think we've been crossing that line. And I think arguments like the supermarket one are used to excuse a lot of really invasive stuff that goes much further. I feel like there's been some boiling of a frog. I feel like people just get used to this idea that, oh, you know, we'll give up a little bit of our privacy. Oh, and a little bit more and a little bit more that suddenly, woof, we just have no privacy left.
Annalee: [00:13:15] Yeah, I just read this really interesting book by Byron Tao, who's a reporter that writes a lot about internet business. And I actually reviewed his book for the New York Times. And he talks about something that almost nobody thinks about when they make these little quote unquote bargains to give away their privacy to say a supermarket or a bank, which is that there's an entire aftermarket of data brokers that buy that data from your supermarket, from your internet app, from your phone app that tracks your location and then sells it to all kinds of places, including the, you know, intelligence community, all kinds of intelligence organizations, both in the United States and abroad buy that information.
[00:13:59] So it's not as if you're making a bargain that you can even understand when you do that. Like, it's not like you're saying like, oh, well, but it's convenient. So I don't mind if Whole Foods knows. And it's like, well, Whole Foods is owned by Amazon. Amazon may be selling data to data brokers. Amazon may itself be a data broker. You don't know what happens to that data. Or a great example is like Tinder. You're like, okay, Tinder knows my location. That's fine. But Tinder could be selling that location data to someone in the CIA or someone in another intelligence agency. And so it's not transparent.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:35] Right.
Annalee: [00:14:35] We just don't know what kind of bargains we're making. So how can we possibly know if people are agreeing to have their privacy violated if they don't even know how it's being violated?
Charlie Jane: [00:14:45] Yeah, we could we could definitely talk about the real-world policy stuff for the rest of the episode. I feel like there's been some attempts recently to pass robust privacy laws. But it's telling that in Congress, it's much easier to pass a law that's like, let's ban TikTok or, you know, let's regulate social media like the Kids Online Safety Act, which is a huge ball of awfulness, rather than like, let's just regulate the people who are buying and selling your information, which is where the real problems actually crop up.
Annalee: [00:15:12] Well, let's turn to science fiction now, because you're right. We could both rattle on this forever. And I think that science fiction proposes a lot of interesting ways of thinking about the problem. So there's obviously examples of surveillance, for example, in the show Black Mirror. There's several episodes that deal with it. I think the one that people most think about is the episode called “Archangel”, where a kid monitoring device is implanted into a child's mind and then her mom is able to kind of see through her eyes and dampen down some of her emotions. And it becomes this really disturbing, dysfunctional family situation.
[00:15:53] And then there's also the really fantastic show Person of Interest, which sort of starts as a procedural and then becomes basically like an apocalypse show. But the premise is that the government funds the development of this computer to predict acts of terrorism. And it actually starts predicting all kinds of other possible crimes and other potential victims. And so one of the makers of that machine decides to start using it secretly to fight these other non-terrorist crimes.
Person of Interest
Opening: [00:16:26] You are being watched. The government has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because I built it.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:38] Yeah, I think the notion of pre-crime, like stopping crimes before they happen, is a big one in science fiction. It often dovetails with surveillance. And in fact, in real life, there have been attempts to create predictive mechanisms for finding crimes. And it's always terrible and intrusive. And then, you know, that makes me think of the movie Minority Report, which everybody remembers it for the gestural interface where Tom Cruise swirls his hands around it. It's like, swirl, swirl, swirl, swirl. But actually, it is a lot about surveillance, right?
Annalee: [00:17:09] Yeah. I mean, a lot of these narratives basically acknowledge that in order to predict crime, you have to be hoovering up tons and tons of data on people and looking at their behavior to figure out whether they're doing something shady or potentially shady. And so one of the things that is kind of cool in Minority Report is we obviously see how screwed up it is. Like he walks through a mall that... The main character played by Tom Cruise is bombarded with all of these ads that are personalized. Like we have pants in your size and your size is X.
[00:17:41] Like just announcing that and trying to kind of solicit his attention, but also clearly monitoring his every move to the point where he has to do this really painful procedure to mangle his face in order to get around because his facial recognition is so good that he won't be able to escape. So yeah, Minority Report, in fact, is so much about surveillance that the ACLU of Northern California used to use clips from that movie to demonstrate to potential donors and people involved in the fight for privacy where we were going. They would be like, look, this is a possible vision of the future. And it's not unrealistic.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:21] Yeah. It's interesting to think about the flip side for a second, like science fiction TV shows and movies where surveillance is just like a thing that we don't think about, a thing that doesn't exist in the universe. Like Star Wars, like you break into the Death Star and like there's no security cameras on the Death Star.
Annalee: [00:18:39] I know!
Charlie Jane: [00:18:40] Why would there be security cameras in like this incredibly secure installation? That's like our super weapon that we spent, you know, jillions of credits or whatever, gold placed, whatever the money is in Star Wars, gold pressed, Sith dollars. I don't know.
Annalee: [00:18:52] Credits.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:53] It's credits.
Annalee: [00:18:53] You're making a gold pressed latinum.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:55] Sith dollars. We spent billions of Sith dollars on this super one. But we didn't bother to put in any...
Annalee: [00:19:00] Crypto Sith coin.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:01] Sith coin. Oh, my God. It's totally Sith coin. That's the currency of the Star Wars universe. You know, even the Jedi use Sith coin. They're like, well, it's evil, but it'll get me food. Do you take Sith coin? Yeah, fine.
[00:19:15] But anyway, so they spent, you know, they spent so much money on this super weapon, but they didn't bother to put in security cameras. Star Trek, there's never any surveillance in Star Trek, except if you're wearing a combat, people can be like, boop, boop, where's Dr. Crusher? They're like, Dr. Crusher is, you know, whatever. So but there's that, but there's not like real time like camera surveillance.
Annalee: [00:19:34] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:36] The only place you see surveillance in Star Wars, I guess, is somewhat in the show Andor, which makes sense because Andor is like the one Star Wars that actually kind of thinks about totalitarianism and fascism and how they really operate.
[00:19:50] And like another example that really surprised me, but I thought about it, is the TV show Severance. Like in Severance, it's this incredibly intrusive, invasive thing where they literally mess with your brain to control what you do at work and what you can do in your personal life, what you can know about your work self and your personal life and vice versa. And the main character is being... He has his boss living next door to him, watching him.
[00:20:16] But the one thing they don't have in Severance is security cameras in the office. But I found this giant Reddit thread where they debate like, why aren't there security cameras in this office? They're so concerned to control these workers. But people just wander around the office doing whatever they want and like finding the goats in the weird goat corridor and stuff. And nobody is like, there's nobody sitting there being like, uh oh, they've gone this place. We better like, nope, there's just nobody's watched in that show.
Annalee: [00:20:44] Yeah, I think that it's funny because Severance is all about paranoia. And it is all about how this company can spy on your thoughts, basically, they can see into your mind, or at least they can manipulate what's in your mind. But yeah, there's once you enter the building where they're doing the Severance experiment, it's suddenly back to the 1970s. And yeah, technology was the trope. Yeah, is that it's like this sort of 70s aesthetic, but it is...
Charlie Jane: [00:21:13] Which again, is very Star Wars.
Annalee: [00:21:16] Yeah, because in Star Wars, all the technology looks 70s, like they've stuck with that from the 1970s onward, they're still, you know, maintaining the 70s aesthetic for sure.
[00:21:26] One of the other things about surveillance and particularly I think in Person of Interest to go back to that is that sometimes you have stories where good guys are able to subvert surveillance systems, like break into them the way one of the main characters in Person of Interest does - Finch - and he's able to gain information on some of these non-terrorist crimes.
[00:21:51] And so he's kind of turning the negative possibilities for this surveillance system into something, like I said, that's intended as sort of vigilante justice. He's sort of the surveillance, he's sort of Batman's surveillance capability without the Batman powers. And he, you know, it takes that very seriously. And it becomes a big theme in the show, like who's using surveillance for good reasons.
[00:22:18] And another place we see this is in the Murderbot series, which is actually soon to be an Apple TV show, which I'm really excited about, where the main character is a cyborg called a construct who communicates and also receives information by connecting wirelessly to surveillance rigs all over whatever environment they're in, because they're in this futuristic world where they're in spaceships, it's in a spaceship.
[00:22:47] Thank you for correcting my Murderbot pronoun, yes.
[00:22:51] It's often in spaceships or it's in space stations where there are all these cameras. And so there's all these great scenes where Murderbot is seeing out of their own eyes, but also out of all these different cameras throughout whatever installation they're in. And again, it's shown to be something positive. Murderbot is subverting the system. Murderbot has already subverted its own system by taking over its own brain. It hacks its governor module. That's kind of the opening moment in the first book.
[00:23:28] And so sometimes science fiction allows us to think about how we also might subvert these kinds of systems. Like maybe we don't have to demolish the systems. Maybe we need to sneak into them and use them for justice.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:41] Yeah. And you mentioned Batman. There's a huge thing in The Dark Knight where he was able to use every cell phone in Gotham to spy on everybody, which is like something that, you know, is never dealt with again.
[00:23:52] Yeah. I feel like when we start talking about this episode, my mind immediately went to the boom that we had in found footage movies, you know, like a dozen years ago or so.
[00:24:04] Like there were just so many movies where it was like sometimes camcorder footage that somebody found, but often there would be CCTV footage or webcam footage that was like, we found this and we're stitching it together to make a narrative. And especially, I sat through Paranormal Activity 2, where there's like a long sequence where it's just a, a CCTV camera of like a swimming pool and there's like a tarp that's kind of moving gently on the swimming pool. And it's like, ooh, sinister swimming pool tarp for like 20 minutes or whatever.
Annalee: [00:24:34] Hey, it was scary!
Charlie Jane: [00:24:37] Yeah. I mean, I feel like the Paranormal Activity movies weirdly do more to show us like the, the kind of camera I view, like the CCTV I view of the action that a lot of other films...
Annalee: [00:24:47] Yeah. I mean, as you know, I probably chewed your ear off about this a million times. Paranormal Activity is still one of my favorite horror films. And that's because it is about using a surveillance camera to essentially conjure a demon. And it's a demon that thrives on attention. And so the woman who the demon has been stalking has learned to not pay attention to it. Even when she hears it whispering, she's just like, fuck that. I am not paying attention.
[00:25:15] But her annoying boyfriend is like, I want to learn more about this weird demon that's stalking you. I'm going to put up a 24/7 camera in the bedroom. And because of that, the demon grows in power and grows and grows because it's being watched by this camera, which I just thought was a really fantastic, you know, metaphor for...
Charlie Jane: [00:25:36] Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like that's a metaphor for something. [crosstalk]
Annalee: [00:25:41] Yeah. But there's also a whole sub genre of horror movies like The Saw, the whole Saw series, Cabin in the Woods, Squid Game, which is arguably a thriller, but it's also got a lot of horror in it. And they're all about basically rich people or people with power putting other people into an experiment, a horrifying, deadly experiment, and then spying on them, mostly for fun.
[00:26:06] In both Saw and Squid Game, it's basically just people who are like, I'm just getting a kick out of watching you guys try to kill each other. And in Cabin in the Woods of course, it's a scientific experiment that they're doing. So it's also for gain. It's for scientific gain. And so I think that there's this awareness in horror that people are toying with us from a distance.
[00:26:27] And it also reminds me a little bit about many of the anxieties raised by drone warfare, this idea of killing at a distance, that when you create that distance between the abuser and the abused, it makes that abuse much easier to do. It can happen at scale. You know, you can be just abusing or murdering people, you know, on a massive scale from thousands of miles away.
[00:26:52] And I think that's why I kind of want to end by mentioning that AI is part of this whole horror scenario, because many companies that are gathering surveillance footage are using algorithms, they're using machine learning to find people's faces, to track people's movements, and also in many cases, as we learned when we talked to Joy Buolamwini a few episodes ago, a lot of it is extremely racist because the data is biased. And so a lot of these kinds of AI systems will assign criminality to black faces because they have bad data. And so there's been cases where, for example, people were arrested just because the AI thought that their face looked like the face of another black person and could tell them apart.
[00:27:46] But there's also this horrifying thing where a ton of buildings are using facial recognition for secure access. So you don't have a key, you just show your face to the camera and it lets you in. But the cameras don't recognize black and brown faces. And so you get these situations in New York, which Dr. Buolamwini talked to us about, where an elder is carrying all her bags trying to get into her building, and the building just won't let her in. And that alone, to me, is a kind of everyday horror scenario.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:20] Yeah. And I think that as white people, we have the very different idea about what surveillance dystopia means because it affects us very differently.
Annalee: [00:28:27] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:29] Okay. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to be talking to author Wole Talabi.
[00:28:34] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:37] Now, we’re so lucky to be joined by Wole Talabi - author of the incredible novel: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon - which was just nominated for a Nebula Award and a British Science Fiction Award. His latest book is the short story collection: Convergence Problems. Wole is also an engineer. He grew up in Nigeria and currently lives in Australia. Welcome, Wole.
Wole: [00:28:56] Thank you very much, Charlie Jane. Thank you very much, Andy. It is awesome to be here.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:03] Yeah, it's so lovely to be talking to you. Actually, so the thing I loved about Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is this thing where, like, everybody works for the Orisha Spirit Company, and it's kind of this capitalist enterprise. And, like, I read an interview where you said, you know, you said that in Nigeria, everybody says religion is big business. So, you know, what made you want to turn the Orishas into a capitalist enterprise in that book? Was it like a satire against the commoditization of religion?
Wole: [00:29:27] Yes, in part. So I kind of arrived at that point, starting by thinking about the character, like the title character, Shigidi. I had just been looking into things to do with the Orishas in general, Yoruba mythology, which is very rich, complex, not that often talked about, but seems to be changing now. And years ago, I came across Shigidi.
[00:29:55] Shigidi has a complicated history in Yoruba mythology, which I won't get into now. But a version of Shigidi is the version I use, which is the Nightmare God. And in the book I was reading, which was written by this Nigerian researcher, he described different cultural views as to how Shigidi operated. And he basically described the key points, which is: Shigidi fights nightmares and people build this small statue on an idol of Shigidi in their house. They pray to it to either give their enemies nightmares or to prevent people from giving them nightmares. And then Shigidi goes to the enemy's house as a spirit, sits on the person's chest until they can't breathe anymore. In the middle of the night, they have a nightmare. And then sometimes they die.
[00:30:42] And I just thought, that must be the shittiest job in the world. The entire job description is be ugly and give people nightmares and then maybe kill them. And that literal thought in my head, shittiest job in the world, is how I arrived at Orisha Spirit Company. Because I thought, OK, let's take that seriously. What if it actually was a job? What kind of company would you work for? So the Orishas would have to be structured as a company. What would that look like? What do I want to say using that structure?
[00:31:10] And then it just made sense because to me, religion is such a big business in Nigeria. They have these huge mega churches, pastors are revered figures that are this weird mix of CEOs, but cult leaders. It's, quite frankly, very strange and hard to describe. If you've seen, it's a weird mix of American South, Southern Baptist, Evangelical, Protestant church with an entirely different context, the way people treat cultural tribal leaders in Africa. So it's a very bizarre mix.
[00:31:53] And so I grew up around that and I thought about all the ways that business has infused religious thought and thinking. And I said, OK, let's take this seriously, because to me, God's... My central thesis of the book, generally, when I try to be concise about it, is that our gods are us, essentially. Right? And they reflect different aspects of us.
[00:32:14] And that's what I try to capture in the book, right, from Shigidi having a job he doesn't like, wanting more from himself, which is a very human thing, to even other gods just being greedy and wanting more for themselves, which is very much a real thing we have in the world. And capitalism is in itself such a pervasive force that I imagine well: What if the gods had adopted that?
[00:32:39] So I actually have an imagined version where whatever dominant government system, socioeconomic system is in place with humans, it is reflected in the spirit world. So they have... It's not as if they've always been this way. They have adjusted because we have adjusted. They used to be a family-run business. They used to be very focused on community and each other. And now they've turned into this mega corporation. And that's something I'm hoping to get into in the eventual sequel, which no dates, no nothing, no nothing yet. That's something I want to return to. But yes, that was a very central idea.
Annalee: [00:33:17] So I know that you've talked a lot about how science and engineering inspires you. And I also read that you're a reservoir engineer.
Wole: [00:33:25] I am.
Annalee: [00:33:26] I just wanted to know, what is that? Like, what do you... What kinds of stuff are you engineering? Can you talk about your work?
Wole: [00:33:32] Nobody knows what it means, but it's provocative. No, so reservoir engineering is basically a branch of engineering that focuses on applying scientific and engineering principles to fluid flow, but fluid flows specifically through porous media. And by porous media, we just mean the Earth's structure, right?
[00:33:57] So flow through rocks, basically, is reservoir engineering. And the focus of that is to, of course, either produce things from the Earth's subsurface or to inject them. And that means everything from water reservoirs, boreholes, to geothermal, to oil and gas, to subsurface hydrogen, to lithium, subsurface lithium reservoirs, to even sometimes you can use the subsurface as a bioreactor.
[00:34:31] You inject certain things, there are subsurface microbes, you inject certain things, they react on it and they release things that you can use as energy. It's not very large scale, but I like mentioning it because it's fun. It's one of the areas I like to look at.
[00:34:44] But you can think of reservoir engineering as basically mining, but for fluids, for liquids and gases, as opposed to solids. So that is what I do. My core area of focus with reservoir engineering is I work more on the computer simulation, computer modeling side. So modeling the physics of those processes, how they work, how do you control them? How do you manage them? How do you understand what you're going to get out or what's going to happen if you put stuff in the Earth's subsurface?
[00:35:18] And I work for a company called SLB, who is involved in all these areas I talked about, oil and gas, geothermal, water and lithium. But my main focus is on my area of specialization, I should say, is on hydrogen production and on carbon storage. So CO2 storage, putting it back in the reservoir as opposed to releasing it. So yeah, that's what I do.
Annalee: [00:35:48] That's super interesting. So I mean, ultimately, I mean, a lot of people are thinking about carbon storage as being part of how we're going to mitigate the effects of climate change. And I mean, that's the hope. That's the hope. Do you see that as being something that creeps into your writing? Does it give you hope that we might be able to reach a solution for drawing down carbon?
Wole: [00:36:13] Yes and no. It's actually a much more complex question than it seems because I think it's a socioeconomic and political policy problem.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:22] Oh yeah.
Wole: [00:36:23] Carbon storage, I see it as essentially, it's a band-aid. It's a way of putting a bandage on the wound, but you're not treating it. We still need to, one: think about alternative energy sources, but also two: just the degree of consumption, if not we'll end up right back where we are right now.
[00:36:47] Even if we switch entirely to renewables, thinking about things, for example, as a reservoir engineer, I also look at lithium production, and lithium is mostly used in batteries. And I can tell you today, if we tried to switch out all our energy consumption into renewables, they're very hard to store, right? So you can't really store solar power except you need a battery. You can't really store wind because you need a battery. And then battery production will skyrocket. And the production for that is not sustainable either.
[00:37:19] So we will end up right back where we started. So it does give me some hope that at least people are thinking in the right direction. That gives me hope.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:29] Yeah. So back to Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, which I'm just a huge fan of that book. And I'm so excited that there's a sequel coming. You know, a big part of the plot of that book is Shigidi and Neoma stealing the brass head of Obalufon from the British Museum.
[00:37:46] Like I read in an interview where you said that you visited the British Museum and that you sort of thought about it. They're kind of iconic as like the most stealingest institution on the planet. They just steal from everybody. So, you know, what specifically made you want to have them steal from the British Museum? And what does that symbolize about like their place in the world and, you know, their place in the cosmology?
Wole: [00:38:07] Yeah, the British Museum, aka the warehouse of stolen goods. I think for me, it's basically as I said, the British Museum is the avatar of everything museums have done wrong since their inception and what some of them are trying to fix now, which the British Museum is still very silent about the topic of returning cultural artifacts that came through suspicious provenance. I think they're just kind of waiting to see where things go.
[00:38:44] And the idea of having Shigidi and Neoma take something from there essentially symbolizes what I think is happening now, especially in the last, say, 10 to 20 years or so, where there's kind of been this reckoning globally with lots of cultures around the world thinking about why there are cultural artifacts - some of which are very precious to people still; they are items of spiritual value - why they are being held in other countries by people that are one, not even really taken care of, even though they claim to.
[00:39:24] I wanted a heist story because when I was in the museum, in the British Museum, I kind of just felt I want to take these items out and I wanted to take that feeling and write it into the book. So I wanted to have a heist where that happens.
[00:39:37] But the second layer of subtext, which I kind of put in spots around the book, is that being able to make that demand or realize that you want things that were taken from you back, requires a certain level of political ability and political capital and strength. And that is literally what's happening in the Orisha Spirit Company, is the old god that created everything, Olorun, has kind of been away. And in that time, basically, the Yoruba people have been colonized, have been under oppressive military regimes.
[00:40:17] And he's only just kind of come back into the business and realize that this is not where I want things to be. And the first thing he wants to do is get this cultural artifact back, but it also contains literal power. And that is the power to reassert himself as the CEO of the company and also being in control.
[00:40:36] And to me, I kind of wanted to show that those are two halves of the same thing. Having agency to say you want to be your own political or economic entity requires, it's kind of a prerequisite, before you can actually make demands of other institutions and things like colonial institutions that have been around for a long time and have a lot of power and have built the structures to favor themselves. You kind of need to assert your own internal agency. And that's what's happening both within the Orisha Spirit Company. There's a power struggle.
[00:41:16] But as part of that, Olorun is trying to reassert his own political capital to be able to compete on the same level. It's mostly setting up things for the second book, so I don't want to get too far into it, because the second book really, or at least in my idea of it, which I'm still working on, really gets into why that happens. And I kind of view it in a sense as a metaphor for how Africa used to be in pre-colonial times, and what has happened since, colonization, globalization, and now essentially capitalization.
[00:41:53] I'm going to make that up as a term, which is we've been kind of being colonized by capital at this point. Everybody has adopted a capitalist mindset, which is maybe not the best way to think about how to organize community and culture. So the events here are kind of the jumping off point for that initial reckoning that this is not how we should be, but we also exist in a global power structure that has forced us to be this way.
[00:42:23] So first we assert our own power by literally taking back some element of it, and then we start to think, so how do we want to rebuild? And that's essentially where I'm going with the ideas of the book.
Annalee: [00:42:38] That's super interesting. So I have been thinking a lot about this line from your short story, “An Arc of Electric Skin,” which is collected in Convergence Problems. One of the characters is talking to the other one and says, “this country happens to all of us, some more than others”. And I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about what that means in the story. But also, I feel like it's a theme that runs through a lot of your stories in that collection. And it's just, it feels very resonant right now. I mean, with me as a person in the United States, and I know that's not what it's intended for, but how does that fit into your to your thinking about that story and other stuff?
Wole: [00:43:18] Yeah, I think part of it is, yeah, there is a version of that story I wrote where the character says, “Nigeria happens to all of us”. And then I swapped it out later. I made it more general because it's true everywhere, right? We are part of communities, micro and macro scale. Family is probably the smallest unit or a friendship group. And then at this current stage, you have states or union states, for example, like the EU. And in many traditional African philosophies, there is this idea of relationality that we only exist in relation to each other, right?
[00:43:59] The famous Ubuntu saying, “I am because we are”. So once we organize ourselves into a kind of entity, like a country, for example, then we are affected by everything that happens there. We like to think that we are all impermeable individuals that are completely in control of our own destiny and everything that happens. But it's not quite true.
[00:44:23] We're all a result of everything that's happening in the community. And Nigeria, in particular, or what I was getting at in that story, is that Nigeria is a very difficult, strange and beautiful country, but full of traumatizing events, especially throughout its history. So I kind of already talked about some of this during the colonial period. Even Nigeria as a political entity to group people. It's not a real country. I've said in a few places: Nigeria is not a real country. It was made for British colonial convenience.
[00:44:58] They literally just drew a line around certain areas and smashed a group of people that had different histories, different cultures, different relations to each other and said, you guys are one thing now. And that has created so many problems going forward, even after the physical colonial structure was removed, the shape of it remained and greedy people filled it.
[00:45:21] Essentially, some of the worst people in our society filled it. And the country has been plagued by corruption, bad leadership. There was a coup in the 60s that led to a terrible civil war. For a long time after that, the military seized control of the country. So I grew up under essentially military occupation.
[00:45:43] The military ran the country until 1999. When they finally handed power over back to civilians. And throughout that time, a lot of really strange things happened, I would say. By strange, it's hard to describe. There's a culture of extreme violence in some places. You grew up kind of with people saying things like, you know, the police could literally just shoot you and they never have to explain what happened. Inside jokes about things like things like stray bullets, you know, there's always something in the news about, oh, someone was killed by stray bullets. And it usually just means somebody just decided to shoot them. And that person is in a position of power. And we're not going to do anything about it.
[00:46:32] So you kind of grew up with this culture of like, anything can happen, literally, especially during the military period. Anything can happen. It could be terrible. It could be wonderful. There's so much bizarre things, so many bizarre things that could happen just in that structure. And a lot of it has happened to a lot of people politically.
[00:46:53] And in that particular story, I was referring to a lot of the history, right? This history of violence, this history of instability, of insecurity, of not knowing what could happen, but still trying to survive. And that's kind of what happens to everybody. And it's something I feel like all Nigerians have in common, no matter where you are.
[00:47:16] That every single Nigerian I've met, you know, we've realized that we've grown up in a place where any extreme thing could happen, and you've had to struggle to make it despite that, right? You find your openings where you can, and you either survive, or in many cases, you die. Many people live far below the poverty line.
[00:47:40] That's another thing that we had as well. There's this huge wealth inequality where I don't think I've seen anywhere else, except possibly in India, where you could have a 15 bedroom mansion right next to a slum, and people are comfortable with this. And it's always just felt like a country of contradictions and unpredictability and instability.
[00:48:04] Now, a lot of that has changed, but the legacy of it remains like things don't just immediately disappear. And especially when I was growing up, it was very true. There was so much that was just difficult to think about. So it's something that I feel like every Nigerian has been grappling with, which is what is a Nigerian identity? What's the balance between survival, thriving, and maybe reasserting a sense of Nigerian identity despite everything that's going on? So that's essentially what that line was getting at.
Annalee: [00:48:40] And then that character, of course, he uses the melanin in his skin to just like... I mean, sorry, spoilers for a story that a lot of people have already read, but he just mows down an entire group of extremely corrupt politicians and military honchos, making way for a better kind of feminist regime, or at least slightly feminist, a little bit more democratic. Yeah. So, I mean, we're still left with that.
[00:49:09] I feel like there's not a sense in that story that even if things get slightly better, that we're leaving behind the country happening to him and to all of the characters.
Wole: [00:49:19] Yeah, no, because I feel like if I had made the story kind of end with, you know, the traditional, quote unquote, good superhero ending, where there's this big act of violence that wipes away all the evil political business and military class that have caused so much of the country's problems, that everything will be fixed because it's not really true.
[00:49:42] Like I said, military rule ended in 1999. And corrupt politicians have held us back for a long time. In some cases, there were periods where it looked like things were getting better. People were reorganizing. The economy was booming again up until about... I'd say 2011, 2012. And then it started to regress again, because you still have people, the politicians themselves, in a sense, they're kind of victims. They all grew up in that same Nigeria where violence was power, literally. And that's what they've learned. That's what they know. That's what they used to. So everybody kind of regresses back to that. And the problems continue.
[00:50:24] And even, I don't think violence is a solution. So I used it in the story because one, I thought it made the story interesting.
Annalee: [00:50:31] Makes it very cool.
Wole: [00:50:32] Two, I was quite angry when I wrote that story because I wrote it in the wake of a recent tragedy in the country's history. During the lockdown in 2020, there was what we called the end SARS protest, where a lot of very young people were protesting police brutality.
[00:50:53] Actually SARS, S-A-R-S, which means the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, was a group of police officers that were basically operating with impunity in the country. And they had a habit of harassing any young person that they thought had money. And instead of investigating, because you were a potential robber to them, you were a criminal or whatever. So they would literally just stop you.
[00:51:19] If you were driving a nice car, you're a young man, a young woman driving a nice car. They would stop you and ask, where did you get it? If they don't like the way you're talking back to them, they could literally just kill you. They would take you in and people would never hear from you again.
[00:51:34] So there were all these cases of them brutalizing, killing people. And eventually people had had enough. And they started a protest to kind of get the government to end SARS, to ban them.
[00:51:46] And this kind of snowballed into a bigger protest about government accountability and everything else that was going on in the country. And for a while, there was like this glimmer of hope. There was like, oh, actually, it looks like this protest, there's enough political weight and population strength behind it. Like enough people are getting behind this. Even market women, everybody in civil society was getting behind it. And you look like, oh, is this a real moment of change?
[00:52:14] And then at one of the main protest sites in Lagos at a toll gate, which is near my family house in Lagos, where my brother lives. They called in the military and they shot at the protesters and killed several of them. And that was kind of the beginning of the end of the protest. And you can just see it's the typical M.O. Even though we're not in a military occupation anymore, that's the way the country has always been run. Eventually someone cashes in their violence card and uses it to reassert control over everyone else regardless of what people want.
[00:52:51] And that's something they learned from the colonial masters as well. That was the way the colonial masters controlled them. So they learned it. And that's how they use it to control people. So I was very angry when I wrote that story. And I kind of modeled a lot of the events in the story around the N-SARS protest. There's a similar protest. The character is tortured, is taken in by police and tortured at one of these things. And then decides, you know what, I've had enough. I'm going to do something. And that's why he goes on this rampage.
[00:53:19] But I don't think that's a real solution. And I didn't want the story to imply that it was. It was just me kind of working out my feelings around that protest of that big hope and then disappointment because back to the usual violence.
Annalee: [00:53:34] So interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:35] Yeah. So one final question, then we should let you go. You know, you wrote this amazing story about a robot artist in the story Debut. And I read that you also took part in a Google experiment to use like an AI tool for writing. And can you talk about, like, why you're interested in robot consciousness and how technology can help us to be more creative and also, like, how do we use technology to be creative without being co-opted by corporations? I guess that's a lot in one question, but I'm kind of interested.
Annalee: [00:54:06] Yeah. Answer just quickly.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:07] But robot artists and AI writing kind of those two things together seem interesting to me.
Wole: [00:54:12] That's my favorite kind of question. It's like the three-hit combo. It's like, here's one question that actually contains three separate questions. I will talk about the robot artist because it's one of my favorite stories I've written. And in fact, I just wrote a sequel to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:30] Oh, nice.
Wole: [00:54:31] That takes place three million years in the future. And that story will appear in the next Twelve Tomorrows” anthology from MIT Press. I think it's called, “Deep Dream”. It's edited by Indrapramit Das. So that should be out, I think, later this year. I love that story because it gets at two things I think about a lot. One is the nature of intelligence and consciousness, right? What are these two things we really don't know? We actually have no idea how our own brains work. People have come up with all these models for them. And I think at some point, the model of, like, the consciousness as software and the brain as hardware became really prevalent. But I think now everybody realizes it's much more complicated than that.
[00:55:23] So I find it fascinating. I've kind of looked into it a bit. I've tried to understand some of the neuroscience of consciousness. And there's just lots of fascinating things. So it's a place I love to explore because I find the most interesting science fiction is in the gap between what we know and what we don't know. Right. That's literally what we do. Science fiction is we extrapolate into that gap. And see where things could be interesting.
[00:55:48] I personally think that there's something unique about human consciousness, human intelligence, the way we process the world. And I think we will perhaps not be able to create anything without putting some element of ourself into it, which is why a lot of my AI stories, I have a lot of them. I think three or four of them appear in Convergence Problems, but I have some published in my previous collection, Incomplete Solutions. And many of these stories feature some kind of recording of the human mind. We're taking some element of the human mind recorded and then using it to create an artificial intelligence. Because I personally think that we will never 100% be able to completely understand our own minds well enough to replicate all the mechanics of it.
[00:56:45] But we might understand it enough to make a copy. Right. Because that's something that happens a lot in engineering, is we might not figure out all the details about how something works, but we can emulate it. And that's kind of where I come at it a lot. So I have this fictional science that I've made up that appears in several of my stories called Memrionics, which is kind of derived from memory electronics. But also it sounds a bit like mnemonic, which is something to do with remembering, because it's about recording memories and neural pathways and patterns and then emulating them in a kind of digital space to make an artificial intelligence.
[00:57:25] I use real AI intentionally because what is being sold as AI today is not, I mean, it's not intelligent and it's not artificial either. These AI tools are, they're basically complex statistical machines, right? They are Bayesian probability engines and not much more than that, but they can do impressive things. They are tools for extended cognition is the way I think about them. Just like your calculator is, we have taken this repository of human created things: words, sentences, stories, papers, journals, all of this stuff. And we've used Bayesian statistical tools to be able to predict a relationality between them - to say if this sequence of words is used in a prompt, generate the next sequence of words. There's no intelligence there. It's just all statistics.
[00:58:25] However, the reason I wanted to work or the reason I worked with Google on the project you mentioned, kind of testing this tool that they had created for creative writing was, one, I like the approach they took. When they first approached us, they didn't even say it was... It wasn't a tool that they wanted to sell. And it wasn't from the Google commercial department. It was from the pure research team. And the guy I spoke to basically said, we have this set of tools. We are curious what people would use them for. And we think maybe writers would use them. So why not get a bunch of writers? Let them use it and tell us, do they even like it at all? Is this something they would want? If so, what's good about it? What's bad about it? And then we think about it some more.
[00:59:17] And that's an approach to technology development that I like and I think is useful, right? The people that are going to use the thing should be the ones that have the loudest voice in its creation, which is unfortunately not what's happening right now. But I like that approach. And I worked with them on this tool called Wordcraft, which is still not commercial, which is good because I don't think it should be, especially not now.
[00:59:47] And also at the time, there was one thing I wasn't aware of, which I wish I was more. And that is the history of the training data that was used to build a lot of these tools, including Wordcraft. When I was first approached by them, I think this was what, 2021, maybe 2022? I think 2022.
[01:00:14] It was quite before a lot of the explosion around ChatGPT came and then everyone started asking these questions like, wait, where did the training data come from? Because I think the well is poisoned on all current AI tools.
Annalee: [01:00:30] Yes! It's a parallel to what we were talking about with the British Museum. What's the provenance of all of this creativity?
Charlie Jane: [01:00:38] Yeah, that's such a good way of putting it.
Wole: [01:00:40] During the experiment with Google, what actually ended up happening was I found the tool most useful for was telling me what I didn't want to write as opposed to helping me write anything.
Annalee: [01:00:56] That's interesting.
Wole: [01:00:57] I already had an idea for the story I wanted to write. And so I plugged in kind of the first few lines I had been thinking about. And then I just put a prompt like, okay, so tell me what happens next. And it tried to write the next paragraph. And I was like, well, that's not what I want at all. But now I had something to correct.
[01:01:16] So I just basically wrote that paragraph. And then I was like, so what next? And it was something else. I was like, yeah, but not really. No. And then I rewrote it again. And what I found most useful, and I think I put that in the white paper, was it actually helped me never have a point where I was blocked as a writer. I never stopped because there was always either something to fix or I already knew what I wanted to write anyway. So I wrote it. And at the point where I stopped, I could get a prompt that I would promptly delete, but then the process of rewriting it gave me a kind of forward momentum. And I thought that was potentially useful.
Charlie Jane: [01:01:53] That's so interesting. I love that.
Wole: [01:01:56] I think the finished story probably has, if you actually count word by word, how many words were generated by the tool is maybe 3%. I rewrote basically everything, but it helped me have that forward momentum.
Annalee: [01:02:10] The brainstorming.
Wole: [01:02:11] Yeah. And I would like to see that in a different context where the tool is built with the community of writers in mind for us with consent and with clear boundaries set. So I'm glad that wasn't a commercial thing, because I would feel very bad if I had actually given some corporate entity money in order to develop that. But yeah, I think there are potential use cases. We just need to reframe the way we think about it and the way the businesses are set up right now.
Annalee: [01:02:41] Awesome. Well, that's a great way to end. Where can our listeners find your work online? Where can they find it in the real world?
Wole: [01:02:49] You can find my books. There's three of them, two short story collections and the novel, which Charlie Jane mentioned. You can find them wherever books are sold in bookstores, mostly in the US, I think right now, but everywhere else. I have some new short stories. Well, the most recently published one was in an anthology called 99 Fleeting Fantasies, which is a flash fiction story. And you can check it out.
[01:03:17] The book contains 99 stories. So I think it's worth that. I already mentioned the sequel to “Debut”, which is coming later this year called “Encore”. So that will be in the 12 Tomorrows Anthology. And yeah, my website is wtalabi@wordpress.com. You can find me there. I keep updates on my blog as much as I can. I don't update it as much as I should, but I try. On the interwebs in most places as @wtalabi, Instagram, the website formerly known as Twitter, BlueSky, a bunch of places.
Charlie Jane: [01:03:57] Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us.
Wole: [01:03:58] Thank you.
Charlie Jane: [01:04:04] You've been listening to our opinions are correct. If you just randomly stumbled upon our podcast, we're in all the places. We're on like Apple and Stitcher and Zarbnarb.
Annalee: [01:04:14] But not Google anymore.
Charlie Jane: [01:04:17] Not Google anymore. Sigh. Pouring one out. If you like us, please leave a review. It really helps a lot. Like it helps a ton. And you can find us on social media. We're on Mastodon. We're on BluSky. We're on Instagram. I think we're still on TikTok. And you know, you can follow our Patreon. Patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And that lets you be in our Discord and hang out with us. Thanks so much to our incredible producer and sound engineer, Naya Harmon. Thanks a ton to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And thanks again to you for listening. And we'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But if you're a Patreon subscriber, we'll see you in Discord and we'll have a mini episode next week. Bye.
[01:04:59] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]